Out of Line

A Poem for the Women Who Are More Than Survivors, Pastors, and Collateral Damage in the Southern Baptist Convention

Jun 09, 2024

Woman's foot with high heel stepping across a line of sand

Women in the faith community in which I was raised were driven by a conviction that believers shared in a priesthood. It wasn’t just women. We all believed this, or that’s at least what I was taught and thought. It’s a theology referred to as the “Priesthood of all believers.” I was raised to believe that all means… all. That I too, as a girl, and as a woman didn’t need a priest as a believer in God, to give me direct access to God. I could pray and talk with God any time I wanted. However, one of the most foundational of Baptist doctrines, when push came to shove, appears to not have applied to all the way they taught us it would. Apparently all, to some, only meant the men.

The Southern Baptist denomination was largely built upon the hard, albeit often unseen, work of women. The Woman’s Missionary Union and very specifically women such as Lottie Moon, a woman who worked to eradicate foot binding of girls in China, wrote letters and saved pennies to build this denomination over the years to become the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. It remains, even with its dwindling numbers at now lower than 13 million members, still the largest. It has been built on the backs of the free labor of women, with few women given titles to give them any authority or decision-making abilities at tables built mostly by men for men. There have been great women leaders all along in this denomination, and some of them such as Dr. Molly Marshall, a gifted pastor and beloved former professor of Southern Seminary, were ousted when Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler were performing their conservative takeover in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s. She was the first female theology professor and associate dean at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. However, she was forcibly removed in 1994 because she was a woman. Suddenly, the Priesthood of Believers was at stake by power hungry men burning witches at the metaphorical stake and their complimentarian crusade to rid Southern Baptist seminaries and pulpits of the voices of women using their God-given gifts to teach men as the women of Romans 16 such as Phoebe and Junia historically have done.

There were signs along the way that things would potentially get better, and I stayed in this denomination for years, in hopes that it would. However, with the many abuse cases and incessant institutional coverup, followed by my own spiritual and psychological abuse as a woman pastor on staff at an SBC megachurch in San Jose, CA, I left a denomination that I now unfortunately see clearly as one that has no system in place that will prioritize people over power when it comes to women using their God-given pastoral gifts nor for survivors of any type of abuse at the hands of a pastor in it’s pulpits, especially the celebrity ones.

My therapists over my past 3 years of healing from my own workplace trauma on a church staff that included my pastor summoning me to multiple one-on-one meetings of belittling, intimidation, coercion, name-calling, gaslighting, followed by false narratives spread about me to the staff and volunteers in the church, firing me in retaliation for reporting my abuse, and tying my family’s medical insurance and severance to an NDA, have encouraged me to write my thoughts down. In journaling my thoughts and even writing some poetry, the right brain begins to heal through a side door of sorts.

My maternal grandmother was a poet. My older brother is an award-winning song writer. My uncles on my dad’s side are song writers. There seemed to be a call from my therapist, my bloodline, and something in my very bones calling me to step into putting words on paper to process my own story, and invite others in to find themselves in my story too.

Tracing ancestors with my mom in Wales, Scotland and England in April 2024

In tracing some ancestors, I’ve discovered some of my Welsh, Scottish and British ancestors wrote poetry too. Several of them fled to the colonies in a time of intense religious trauma, coercive control by clergy, coupled with spiritual, psychological and physical abuse. One of my ancestors left the shores of Wales alone at 12 years old to go to Pennsylvania in the time many Quakers were embracing a nonviolent expression of faith in the midst of extreme religious violence in Wales.

In these past few months of taking my healing journey to deeper levels of the onion layers, I’m embracing a call from my ancestors to adopt this new invitation into healing. There is something truly next level about putting it all onto a page and outside of the dispersed places in the brain were trauma scatters like a shattered windshield in a traumatic car accident.

I offer this poem to you in hopes that it will inspire you to write your own thoughts down, and put your feelings and words often unspoken and unwelcome onto a page where you can begin to open doors of flourishing that your faith community, your denomination, or your high control religious environment have tried to keep locked shut. There are doors to which only you hold the key. There are lines that you are free to cross.

There have been lines in the sand drawn to evoke fear that you would be on the side of the demonic instead of on the side of a pastor who was secretly practicing evil while blaming a “Jezebel” for his own wickedness in true DARVO form. There was a fear poured into your body by a coercive controlling pastor who made you cross every “t,” and dot every “i,” so you wouldn’t be a receptacle for his fiery wrath. You knew if you stepped out of line, you would see his anger toward you. You had seen it happen to others, and you fawned in order to avoid it.

You heard what he said and what others repeated from his narrative that painted whistleblowers as “disgruntled,” “bitter,” or “holding a grudge of unforgiveness.” You were a good girl. You were a woman of integrity. You were a man who had been trained that bros don’t go against bros; that we are “all sinners,” and anybody is capable of evil at any time. So, you shoved it down, and minimized the abuse to be safe, to stay in the beloved community, to not rock the boat. You didn’t want to be seen as going against a beloved pastor. How would you begin to start all over again?

However, one day, you realized that that pastor was not all he seemed, and that by toeing the line, you were complicit in a system that had abused many women, girls, boys and men who saw this pastor through the eyes of betrayal blindness. One day, you realized that by toeing the line, you were also out-of-line. The day you took that first, bold step, nothing would be the same. You knew that he was out of line, and that it was time to step out of line.

Out of Line by Lori Adams-Brown